Glorious 2-Acre Gardens | Garden Housecalls (2024)

June 3rd, 2014

You think it’s tough getting a basic quarter-acre yard looking good?

Try planting 2 acres.

I’m just back from leading a trip to see three extraordinary examples of what can be done with 2 acres – given ample gardening gumption.

The first was Stephanie Cohen’s yard in suburban Collegeville, Montgomery County.

You might recognize Stephanie as the “perennial diva,” the well known speaker and author of three garden books (“The Perennial Gardener’s Design Primer,” “Fallscaping” and “The Non-Stop Garden.”)

She moved to her 2-acre lot 16 years ago and promptly removed all of the common green-meatball shrubs and the property’s only tree – an invasive Norway maple.

Then she set to work building her own private paradise – perennial borders along the entire front, a four-square herb garden, a native-plant meadow, and multiple outdoor garden rooms criss-crossed by pea-gravel paths and picket fencing.

Perennial-lovers will especially love this place. You’ll find some of the latest, greatest varieties as well as species few people grow, such as the yellow-flowering phlomis, a tiered bloomer that looks like something out of a Dr. Seuss book.

The lesson I took away is that there’s a huge array of perennials that do well in our climate. So why do we stick with the same daylilies, mums and hostas that everybody plants when we could just as easily grow silver-leafed brunnera or wispy, arching, gold-leafed Japanese forest grass?

Stephanie also has a fine collection of trees and shrubs (although I suspect she grows them mainly as company for the perennials). The one that was catching the most attention from our tour group was a showy version of sweetshrub called ‘Hartlage Wine.’

This 6-foot spring bloomer has especially large flowers of deep rose – way more impressive than the old-fashioned straight species of sweetshrub, although not quite as strawberryish-fragrant.

Stephanie calls her garden “Shortwood.” She says she went with that name because “Longwood” already was taken.

You know you’ve made it as a gardener when your yard has its own name.

The second amazing 2-acre garden was that of Charles Cresson. His Swarthmore yard also has a name – Hedgleigh Spring, for the stream of that name that originates on the property.

Charles is a horticulturist who trained at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Wisley gardens and worked at such public gardens as Winterthur in Delaware and Chanticleer near Wayne, Pa. He’s also a garden writer, lecturer and Hedgleigh’s third-generation gardener.

Charles’ grandfather created the home’s layout starting in 1911 and planted most of the framework. He eventually turned it over to Charles’ father, who built on the original design over another 30 years.

Charles has been further tweaking the gardens since 1979, or as he says, “filling in the corners and embellishing.”

Hedgleigh is a superb example of how one large property can be carved into a series of smaller, more intimate and self-contained gardens – each with its own character or theme.

That kind of “divide-and-conquer” approach is a much more interesting and comfortable way to use this amount of space than the more common approach of planting a huge lawn lined with arborvitae and scattered with maples and butterfly bushes.

One of Hedgleigh’s rooms, for example, is a circular lawn edged in sun perennials. Another is a tree-lined, rock-edged shade garden with a mulched path down the middle. Another is the vegetable room.

My favorite was a sunken bed along Hedgleigh Spring devoted to a long water garden with a bank full of rock-garden plants running along the top of it.

I also liked the 100-year-old red-leafed Japanese maple at the front house corner and Charles’ use of two different vines on many of his trellises. Few people even bother planting any vines on trellises, but interplanting two different species (i.e. climbing roses with clematis or honeysuckle with clematis) gives a fuller look and a tag-teamed bloom time.

The third 2-acre garden is Carolyn Walker’s mostly wooded lot in suburban Bryn Mawr.

Carolyn was once an international tax attorney who realized that working with plants was a lot more fun and rewarding than working with dollar signs. She started planting cottage gardens around her house in 1983 and eventually left the tax world to start Carolyn’s Shade Gardens in 1993.

Carolyn’s Shade Gardens is a sort of “craft nursery” specializing in shade perennials. It’s open only by appointment, by pre-arranged group or on selected open house days.

Visitors get to see what Carolyn has done with her 2 acres. Her property is basically two main parts – a sunnier area down three terraced gardens and a shadier area out back that encompasses shade beds and a mulched path through the woods.

It’s a gardening plus whenever a property has distinctly different settings like these, allowing the gardener to grow just about any plant somewhere. In my mind, that’s better than having a property that’s all sun or all shade, limiting what you can do to just one category.

The main take-away from Carolyn’s place is just how many perennials will thrive in the challenging dry shade and root competition around big trees.

Most people try to plant azaleas, rhododendrons and maybe mountain laurel in that setting. What so often happens is that the big tree roots suck the life out of those young plants, either stunting them or killing them outright in a few years.

Gardeners who figure that out often switch to a groundcover of Japanese pachysandra, which is cheap and usually works well. But it’s over-used and not terribly showy or wildlife-useful… just an OK solution.

Under Carolyn’s trees, you’ll find swoops of showier alternatives, such as barrenwort, foamflowers, brunnera, liriope and lots of hostas, ferns and forest grasses with colorful foliage.

All three of these gardens are filled with ideas that can translate into smaller pieces on smaller lots.

Now if only these gardeners could package some of their energy to go along with the inspiration…